Technology

Eyes on the Universe: James Webb Space Telescope Completes Instrument Alignment Phase

By on Saturday, April 30, 2022

The James Webb Telescope has successfully completed the alignment of its observation instruments in space and is ready to operate at full capacity.

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Its four powerful instruments, three image processors and a spectrometer, were successfully aligned with the main mirror (6.5 meters in diameter).

whose deployment ended in early January, two weeks after the launch of the James Webb Telescope (JWST) . ).

Each instrument has reached its “operational temperature” and is ready to be used, NASA explained in a statement.

Waiting for the first scientific observations to arrive (scheduled for the summer), it was confirmed that the instruments are capable of “capturing sharp and well-oriented images” such as, for example, of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy, satellite of the Milky Way, which was taken by the Mirim instrument.

“This first image is magnificent, because we already have the quality we were looking for,” Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Mirim’s scientific manager at the French scientific research organization CEA, wrote on Twitter.

“Everything is going perfectly and … I am sure that with the JWST we will advance science by giant steps,” he added.

“These test images show what can be achieved between people from different countries and continents when there is a courageous scientific vision to explore the universe,” said Lee Feinberg, command of the JWST telescope components on NASA’s Goddard Space Flight. .

The James Webb telescope , which cost 10,000 million dollars, concentrates the hope of astronomers from all over the world, since it will allow observing the first galaxies, formed about 200 million years after the Big Bang. AFP.

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